Tuesday, September 23, 2003

Through the weekend and into Monday, Shafer had Charlotte’s state wrong. It’s in North Carolina; Charlottesville is the one in Virginia. This is a trivial error, (since corrected) except that Shafer’s point in naming towns is to show how provincial and third rate the journalism must be there. More telling is how it counts against public journalism that the do-gooding “moneybags” at Pew and Poynter supported some of the costs of the experiment. Now since Shafer’s salary is paid by Microsoft, world’s most powerful corporation, it would seem that supporters of public journalism might at least win a draw in the “who’s more polluted by funding” contest. His purpose in mentioning foundation support is to explain how the idea got as far as it did in the mainstream press: the do-gooders poured money into it. But since Pew is no longer funding its Center for Civic Journalism, why worry?